A Guide to Derailing Conversations

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Derail Using Education

If You Won’t Educate Me How Can I Learn
Whilst seemingly simple on the surface, there is some intertwining subtext embedded within this one.First of all, you’re placing responsibility for your education back onto the marginalized person. As they are obviously engaged with these issues, and care about them, they are hopeful that privileged people may one day start listening and taking on board what they have to say. By placing responsibility to educate in their hands, you tug at this yearning. You may even successfully make many question themselves and their selfish expectations that you utilize the hundreds upon hundreds of resources on the subject available to you as a privileged person! After all, anyone who expects you to be able to research a topic by yourself also clearly expects you to be far more of a functioning adult than you’re acting! By insisting you can only learn if they right then and there sacrifice further hours of time going over the same ground they have so often in the past, you may also make them give up and go away altogether, enabling you to win by default.But further, you give the impression that you really want to learn, but they’re holding you back! That’s right, using this tactic you can suggest that full understanding is what you crave – you want to be a better, more connected and compassionate person – but it’s not your fault! Nobody ever gave you the education! And now that someone is here who is so obviously qualified, they’re denying you your privilege given right to have everything you want handed to you on a platter!Which brings us to another key component of this argument – it is very important, in conversations with Marginalized people to constantly remind them that you are, indeed, privileged. By demonstrating your belief that marginalized people should immediately gratify your every whim, you remind them of their place in society. After all, they’re not there to live lives free of discrimination and in happy, independent and fulfilling ways! Please! marginalized people exist for your curiosity and to make you generally feel better about your place in society and don’t let them forget it!
Point one to you!

If You Cared About These Matters You’d Be Willing To Educate Me

This is the natural follow-up to the above argument, although it can also be used independently.You see, often in these discussions a marginalized person will tell you it’s not their responsibility to educate you. This is because marginalized people believe that they have other priorities in life, like working and studying and being with their families for example. Clearly, they are laboring under a misconception – as a privileged person you have far more right to their time than they do, and besides, don’t they want to make the world a better place? Isn’t that why they alerted you to the fact you were being offensive in the first place? Well, now clearly your education is their responsibility!

By placing this burden of responsibility onto them you remind them of just how daunting a task that is and how their lives are constantly being monopolized by the privileged, even in something that should be empowering to them, like deconstructing discrimination.You trivialize their lives, needs, interests and obligations by suggesting they should be spending all of their time and energy in engaging with clueless Privileged People®, putting in hours and hours of effort in repeating the exact same thing they’ve already said three thousand times to three thousand other privileged people in their past.And furthermore, you remind them that, if they really cared about their own issues, they’d willingly take that task on! Surely it’s a small price to pay to change people‘s minds?Well, you want them to think that, but of course it isn’t After all, most of the conversations they have with Privileged People® often feel to them like beating their heads repeatedly against a brick wall embedded with rusty spikes. Which is entirely the point. Keep them worn out and exhausted and maybe they’ll just go away.

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This website is a simple, step by step guide to derailing an awkward conversation by dismissing or trivializing your opponent's perspective and experience. Just some of the many issues you can apply it to include: